Svenska Dagbladet's shake-up of its editorial systems has meant shorter meetings, tightly planned front pages and more time for original journalism

In Sweden there is an upmarket tabloid called Svenska Dagbladet, or SvD, that looked hard at the way its editorial departments worked, and then turned them upside down. The innovations it introduced were both small and large, but they have combined to create an organisation that feels very fresh.

Meetings are held with staff standing up, in an effort to keep them brief. No one in the newsroom ever reads a list out loud; lists are for emails.

The news pages – including the front page – are heavily planned ahead, with up to 40% produced in advance. The newsroom is divided into two streams: "fast", covering events that cannot be controlled, such as tsunamis, for both web and print; and "slow", concentrating on what SvD describes as its "agenda-setting" journalism, such as homegrown investigations.

Enormous whiteboards dominate SvD's Stockholm offices, detailing investigations that will run up to three months into the future; transparency is a big thing for its 185 editorial staff, who between them produce both a newspaper that appears seven days a week and a website.

But the real innovation at SvD is this: it is adding readers. As newspapers around the world wither on the vine, SvD recently climbed into profit for the first time in its 127-year history.

Since 2001, while Sweden's newspaper market has declined by 17%, sales of SvD have gone up 12%. It sells 195,000 copies a day, mostly on subscription. For all I know – I don't speak Swedish – it's unspeakably dull. But its readers, demonstrably, don't think so.

So why is SvD bucking the trend? It can't only be the standing-up meetings and other anti-timewasting flourishes. And it can't only be the fact that it has, brutally, shrunk its staff by 20% since the credit crunch (albeit without actually sacking anyone).

The managing editor, Martin Jönsson, who runs the newsroom, puts it down to the fact that the paper is, in his view, getting better and better; that its ambition increases with every year that goes by. And one of the keys to this, he says, in a post-credit crunch world, is the focus on forward planning. His motto is that "anything that can be done in advance, must be done in advance".

Jönsson says that he went through the paper before it changed its ways, and worked out that half of it could actually have been written and produced in advance, rather than being flung together on the day – the current tried-and-tested model of all newspapers everywhere. So he dragged the newsroom towards producing large amounts in advance, and now, he says, it is generally agreed that the paper is newsier, as well as better, because of it.

Around two-thirds of front pages are planned, and they go in as initially envisaged up to a week before. The contents of the final third are a reaction to the day's events. The emphasis on original, off-diary stories means SvD's journalists are coming up with more agenda-setting news lines of their own. And because so many pages are prepared in advance, when something big happens, they have more resources to throw at it on the hoof.

Jönsson says it's important generally to be nimble if you shift towards heavy planning. His rule is that when a Mubarak is toppled, for example, planned projects are put on hold, even if they are mid-series – readers are warned with a note in the paper. Then when live news events have died down, SvD has a whole queue of fantastic homegrown journalism ready to roll.

Better planning, he adds, has to be combined with better ideas. Of course none of this is easy. Jönsson stresses that keeping on top of planning is a "daily battle", but, he says, "it's obviously working".

The whole of SvD fizzes with this knowledge, with a palpable sense of self-belief, and that's led to some bold marketing initiatives. In 2005 the paper gave away a few thousand subscriptions to both SvD and its main market rival to people on the street. In return for a month's free subscription to both papers, all the recipients had to do was text in to say which paper they thought was best. The stunt led to an permanent sales bump for SvD.

Whether any of this translates out of Sweden, which has a tiny population, and its peculiar subscription-driven newspaper market, is anyone's guess. But it's tremendously cheering to know that with a bit of verve, and a following wind, quality journalism can be made to pay for itself – even in print.